I'm slowly making ready for something looking like a
code-freeze for 1.2.x, and that means you can all start doing your
favorite pre-release stuff: doing weird things to the latest
kernels and seeing how they break. And maybe even sending me in a
report (or patches if you feel like it).

The latest kernel right now is 1.1.36 (but they have changed
daily) and contains the “mprotect()” system call that some people
have been asking for. The last kernels have gone through major
re-organizations in the memory manager, so we'll see how well it
works out. Also, I wrote the mprotect stuff from scratch instead of
using any of the old patches, so that's rather untested. If you
have something depending on mprotect, do give this one a
try.

(Aside: The mmap() interface still doesn't allow shared
writeable mappings, but now you can do a shared read-only map and
then “upgrade” it with mprotect(). That's not supposed to work, but
I didn't bother to put in the extra checks, as I hope to have real
write-mappings working some day. Going through mprotect is likely
to give bogus results, etc; don't even try it as the kernel may do
strange things.)

Lots of other stuff has also changed in the 1.1.x releases;
sorry for not doing release-notes, but I'm too lazy. Essentially
everything is faster, bigger and better, but it may be a bit
unstable which is why I'd like people to test it out. The credit
goes to everybody who has written code and tested so far
(including, but not limited to Alan Cox, Eric Youngdale, Mark Lord,
Jacques Gelinas, Hannu Savolainen, Frank Lofaro, Rik Faith, Bjvrn
Ekwall, Remy Card, Dmitry Gorodchanin...,the list goes on
forever).

Anyway, I hope 1.1.40 (or 1.1.50 or whatever) will turn out
stable enough to be called 1.2.0 so that people who want to use
mainly stable kernels know which version to get. Sadly, everything
always works perfectly for me, so in order to find the problems
some outside help is needed.

Trending Topics

Webinar: 8 Signs You’re Beyond Cron

Scheduling Crontabs With an Enterprise Scheduler
11am CDT, April 29th

Join Linux Journal and Pat Cameron, Director of Automation Technology at HelpSystems, as they discuss the eight primary advantages of moving beyond cron job scheduling. In this webinar, you’ll learn about integrating cron with an enterprise scheduler.